Back to Cross

I am actually kind of happy I waited a while to write about the Cross reading. While looking over my notes , I wrote down, “people know what to do because of experience.” From this quote, I really believe this is the biggest take away I have from this paper.

Probably the only part of the reading that grabbed me was the section about Phillip Starke and the Juicy Salif. It was a concrete example that backed up what Cross was saying in Design Ability on page eight, “…designing is not a search for the optimum solution to the given problem, but that it is an exploratory process.” By looking at this lemon squeezer, would anyone really know why it was designed the way it was just by looking at it? Probably not, because they do not share the same experiences as Startke. Even if they read the same comic book, there is a good chance each person understood it differently, maybe they did not even pay much attention to the alien insects in the story, but rather the army fighting back the space invaders. The experience shaped what Starke thought Juicy Salif should look like and fit into the home, he would then just have to leave it up to the engineers to figure out how it would work. However, how would an alternative experience have changed Starke’s design?

Cross wants to say a lot of it deals with intuition, using the examples of two faces or a cup and two triangles or the Star of David. Now having the chance to discuss this paper and coming back to it, I understand a lot of what he is arguing by this example. A lot of things really depend on how the designer wants to look at things. Starke got a plate of calamari, which probably had lemon on it, and he was able to draw a connection. An example outside the reading is one I saw on Project Runway Allstars. In the first episode, designers had to design a look for singer Deborah Harry. Elena had a leather jacket that was not turning out the way she was wanting it to, but intuition told her to look at it differently. She decided to put the jacket on the model backwards and the judges absolutely loved it, including the person it was being designed for.

What this comes down to, it really all depends on how the designer wants to look at things. If you look at it just as a plate of squid or as a really bad jacket that cannot be worn any other way, then the intuition of design will be harder to come to. It is when things are looked at in new ways, I believe, is what Cross was trying to argue is design thinking.

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“people know what to do because of experience.” From this quote, I really believe this is the biggest take away I have from this paper.”

Here are some quotes I found interesting during the read.

“The uncertainty of design is both the frustration and the joy that designers get from their activity; they have learned to live with the fact that design proposals may remain ambiguous and uncertain until quite late in the process.”

“These designers are able to recognize opportunities in the way coincidences offer prospects and risks for attaining some desirable goal or grand scheme of things. “

“it is often their ability to find the right problems which distinguishes good from adequate or poor design.”

For your Project Runway

“to draw upon a repertoire of precedents, of remembered images and recollections of other objects that helped him to give a more coherent, practicable and attractive form to the concept.”

I agree with your statement about this paper from Cross. What I really enjoyed was how at first, the paper focused on the designer’s process – finding the methods or reasons used and how a designer ends the process with a solution but then shows how how designers recall and use their experience for design.

This past term in Interaction Design Practice, I found myself recalling from past experiences or interactions to use in designs to solve “the problem”. As pointed out in “Desiderata” by Harold Nelson and Eric Solterman, I used a lot of ‘copy cat’ solutions, or using a ‘blocked out’ approach to solve the issue.

“…block-out approaches try to use simple, often ready-made strategies to make decisions, without investing the time and energy on in-depth examinations.”

I believe that recalling from your memory, “people already know what to do because of experience”, could be both good and bad. Nelson and Solterman encourage us to focus on intention to find “things believed to be desirable” to really start to frame the design project. In this mindset, we should be able to ignore some of the past, recalled designs that might try to resolve issues, but they can also help in influencing how we design in a better mind set. I hope this makes sense; overall I believe past experience can help and also hinder the design process.

*this has been my first attempt to cross papers – critique is welcomed!